WOONSOCKET - The 1990s were the decade when this tumbledown mill city was supposed to pull itself up by its bootstraps.

Architects restored a gloomy downtown theater to its Roaring '20s splendor. Civic boosters transformed an abandoned mill into a popular museum.

A campaign was mounted to pump business back into a ghostly Main Street, and developers were remaking boarded-up tenements into award-winning houses.

Voters sent a tough-talking mayor to City Hall — one who vowed to clamp down on slumlords and to replace the dying textiles industry with businesses more in step with the late 20th century.

And a highway finally opened that linked this island of French-Canadian culture to the national highway system.

So why is Woonsocket still losing population?

Each U.S. census since 1950 has brought this city the same discouraging news: Fewer people lived here than in the preceding decade.

In 2000, Woonsocket's population fell yet again — this time reaching 43,224, its lowest point since 1910. Today, the city has the distinction of being the only Rhode Island municipality with an unbroken five-decade slide in numbers.

NATIONALLY, the 1990s saw the rebirth of many cities, as a high-flying economy, plunging crime rates, and a backlash against suburban sprawl brought people and life back to urban neighborhoods. The trend spanned from California's Oakland to New York's South Bronx to Rhode Island's Providence.

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An additional factor in Rhode Island was the influx of Hispanic immigrants, which led such former factory cities as Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls to their largest population increases in decades. Yet even Woonsocket's gain in Hispanic residents — tripling during the '90s to 4,000 — could not make up for the departure of 5,700 of its non-Hispanic whites.

Melody Love Gonzalez, a Woonsocket resident who promotes Latin bands and is organizing the city's first Puerto Rican festival, says that the city's name simply doesn't ring a bell with many Hispanics.

"When I speak about Woonsocket," says Love Gonzalez, they go, 'Where? Woonsocket? Where's that at?' It's like 10 to 15 minutes away from Providence ... and they consider us like we're what we call en campo — like we're on the farm somewhere."

HOPE HAS sprung up in Rhode Island's sixth-largest city. But it has not yet been enough to reverse years of isolation, disinvestment, and decline — a reminder that the unique history and geography of a place such as Woonsocket can complicate efforts to apply the textbook formulas for urban revival.

Eighty years ago, this small patch of northern Rhode Island was a textiles boomtown; the promise of regular work behind its looms and spindles drew thousands of French Canadians from rural poverty in the province of Quebec.

But by 1990, those days were long gone. Most of the mills had died, and even retail businesses were going belly up.

The decade began with the closure of three downtown landmarks: Auger's Men's Wear, the century-old McCarthy's department store, and the Stadium Theatre, which had fallen on such hard times that it had briefly resorted to showing X-rated movies.

The city suffered another body blow in 1991, when the statewide RISDIC banking crisis forced the closing of 45 credit unions, including Marquette Credit Union, Rhode Island's largest. Two out of five Woonsocket residents had accounts there, and its closure froze $337 million in savings — much of it belonging to hundreds of the city's working-class residents.

The credit-union crash coincided with New England's worst economic downturn since the Depression.

In Woonsocket, prospects were especially dim. The rate of unemployment soared above the state average. The city's schools were cash-starved. Out-of-town landlords simply abandoned their tenements.

And drugs and crime roared into the streets. In one particularly bizarre episode, the star witness in an attempted murder was slain, execution-style, at a Burger King. A self-proclaimed vigilante group took credit for the execution and then mailed letters threatening the lives of several public officials, including Mayor Francis L. Lanctot.

In 1995, Lanctot decided, for various reasons, not to seek a fourth term. The voters defeated his chosen successor and made City Council President Susan D. Menard, a sharp-tongued politician who sometimes works in jeans and heels, their new mayor.

Menard pledged a Woonsocket comeback.

"We are going to turn around the city of Woonsocket," she declared on election night. "We are going to say we are proud to live in Woonsocket."

Shortly thereafter, she changed the city letterhead to read: Woonsocket — A City on the Move.

TO A NEWCOMER, the city looks frozen in time. Hulking brick mills shadow the Blackstone River. Smokestacks — no longer belching smoke — pierce the sky. A rusty railroad trestle crosses over Main Street.

Crowding the neighborhoods are boxy three-deckers — some crammed into rear lots.

Still, by the mid-'90s, rays of light were poking through.

A new economic-development director helped attract such information-age businesses as Unicom and LSI Retail Graphics. And, having debated a move, the CVS Corp. — the national drugstore chain that is Rhode Island's largest publicly traded company — decided to keep its headquarters in Woonsocket. A $40-million building emerged, as did hundreds of new jobs. ("God bless CVS," says one longtime resident.)

These and other businesses cheered the opening of Route 99, which ended Woonsocket's status as one of the few American cities without a link to the interstate system.

Downtown, the city hired architects to burnish the facades of Main Street, where the "Main Street 2000" program brought restaurants and specialty shops into the long-vacant storefronts.

A civic group raised $2.5 million to refurbish the Stadium Theatre as an arts showplace — two weekends ago the jazz star Branford Marsalis headlined its 75th-anniversary celebration.

Nearly $3 million in public and private money poured in to build the Museum of Work and Culture, a tribute to Woonsocket's industrial past that draws some 1,000 visitors per month from around the world.

And last year a new outdoor ice rink opened, giving young people a reason to return to downtown.

AS THE CRIME and unemployment rates dropped, Mayor Menard got a handle on Woonsocket's finances. The city hasn't raised taxes in six years, and its bond rating has climbed high enough to save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments.

Turning her eye toward neglected residential districts, Menard drew up a "21 Most Wanted" list of blighted properties, and promised to demolish them. Today, the names of 150 families appear on a waiting list for the 50 Constitution Hill houses that the Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation has turned from slums into homes.

Menard also declared that Woonsocket, with a higher percentage of subsidized-housing units than any other Rhode Island community, would block any attempt to build more. Instead of luring the region's poor, the city would go after middle-class people interested in buying houses.

The city's grand Victorian residences, along with the glittering riverfront walkways planned for the Blackstone, would replace subsidized high-rises as Woonsocket's chief attraction.

"We felt we needed to diversify the population," says the city's planning director, Joel D. Mathews. "It's one thing to provide for the needs of your less fortunate; it's another thing to overbuild, where you attract" the needy.

On the site of a burned-down factory on Mill Street, developers are putting up a complex of 250 luxury apartments — aimed at young professionals and empty nesters able to afford the $1,100 rent.

The city has also gotten its first large hotel, a Holiday Inn Express and Suites.

"The future of the city is brighter — the perception is it's more of a bull market than a bear market," says Robert L. Martin, the principal real-estate broker at Century 21 Crossroads, which for 18 years has helped people sell and buy houses in Woonsocket. "My agents are not hearing any more 'anywhere but Woonsocket.'"

The drive for renewal in the 1990s was impressive enough that the mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., and officials from Schenectady, N.Y., came in search of ideas for resurrecting their moribund industrial cities.

AND YET, in spite of all this, the surest stamp of approval for a city — a gain in residents — continues to elude Woonsocket.

Mention of this fact triggers a testy response from Mayor Menard. The City on the Move is happy to stay put, she says — at least as far as the size of the population is concerned. Educating any more children, for example, would be expensive. And, she contends, some neighborhoods are packed too densely.

"We don't want residential growth — we're taking down houses, not putting them up," said Menard the other day, in an interview at City Hall.

"I don't want any more people — we have more than enough people in the city of Woonsocket."

Urban-affairs experts say that the mayor's stance sounds more like spin control than sound urban policy. Plenty of medium-sized cities — Alexandria, Va., Annapolis, Md., Hoboken, N.J. — are denser than Woonsocket and have remained attractive places to live.

"That's a defensive reaction," David Rusk says of Menard's point of view. He is a former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., and the author of several books on reviving cities. "If the number of households is declining, then that means, Mayor, that you have fewer and fewer taxpayers, fewer and fewer customers for your businesses.

"This notion that high density is the enemy of quality of life is nonsense."

Others have criticized Menard's disdain for subsidized housing, calling it an affront to the city's working-class heritage and a failure to grasp the role that such housing plays as a steppingstone to home ownership.

"It's a situation where you cut off your nose to spite your face by denying a labor force a good place to live," says Joseph Garlick, executive director of the nonprofit Woonsocket Neighborhood Development Corporation. "When I look at the folks that live in the housing we fix up, they're the city's workers — what little labor force is left."

ON ONE LEVEL, Woonsocket is like many other Northeastern mill towns, trying to reinvent itself in the age of the suburban office park and the World Wide Web. Yet without colleges, major banks, or the large government institutions of a state capital, Woonsocket lacks the perennial employers that have helped other cities weather sharp economic shifts.

But some say that Woonsocket's unique history — its tight-woven French-Canadian culture, its proud past as a textiles giant, and its geographical isolation — is what has made it resistant to change.

"I think we're still trying to find ourselves," says Raymond H. Bacon, a retired high-school teacher who serves as the city's unofficial historian. "I really believe that Woonsocket is still in the midst of this transition from a textile community."

OFFICIALS CONCEDE that the recent effort to inject life into Woonsocket's downtown is a disappointment. A couple of the new handcrafts and gift shops closed within months. In their stead came secondhand stores that Mayor Menard herself labels "junk shops."

Much of Main Street has reverted to empty storefronts and For Sale or Lease signs. A faded piece of paper in the window of the vacant Earth Angels clothing store tells customers: "Moving to California: 25-50% off all in-store stock."

"There's nothing down here that brings anybody downtown," says David Phillips, from behind the counter at the Adams TV Rental store. He has managed the place for 17 years. On a recent afternoon, the business, which rents appliances to mostly low-income residents, was devoid of customers.

"We were doing pretty good 10 years ago," said Phillips. Now, he says, "we have our good days and our bad days."

Then he gives in to nostalgia: "I remember stories my father telling me about when my grandfather used to come to Main Street for the nightlife."

That was a long time ago. Today, a few doors down, boards cover the windows of Alibi's nightclub, and a sign reads: "Building for Sale."

Over in the Hamlet neighborhood, a warren of triple-deckers, Mark Scott, 46, sits on a stoop with an after-work can of Busch beer.

He says he likes his street: the traffic's light; the neighborhood's quiet. But his friend, sitting next to him, a 27-year-old machinist, says that Woonsocket's reputation as a backwater embarrasses him.

"I don't like telling people I'm from Woonsocket," he says, not giving his name. "I think they think we're stupid."

When people — like his Warwick friends — find out where he lives, he says he quickly assures them that he didn't grow up here. "I don't want to be grouped."

This image of cultural insularity frustrates some of Woonsocket's promoters, who see it as a barrier to renewal.

"There are still people who say, 'Oh, you're going up to Woon-sa-kett,'" says Roger Bouchard, a lifelong resident who manages the local radio station, WNRI. "There is not a person here who speaks like that — they've all been dead for 30 years."

JOHN O'HEARNE, 46, could be a poster child for the sort of person the city pines for.

A Rhode Island School of Design-trained architect, O'Hearne moved here in 1980 for a job with the City Planning Department. He married a Woonsocket woman, started his own architectural firm, and bought an antique Greek Revival house on South Main Street.

But about four years ago, he and his family moved just across the city line to rural North Smithfield, where he could build a house on a lot four times the size of the one of his house in Woonsocket.

"When I was able to afford a new home," says O'Hearne, "I chose something a little more quiet."

In the new neighborhood, his 9-year-old son "has a fort in the woods, and I don't even know where it is. He goes out past the power lines and comes back with frogs and wildflowers, and that's something we couldn't do in the city."

EXPERTS SAY that old American cities that have found new lives have followed a course: they elect a visionary mayor, who works to resurrect the downtown, remake the waterfront, and market the historic residential neighborhoods to affluent buyers. Often, a strong nonprofit redevelopment group has raised money for restoration.

"Cities that have come back have been successful at bringing people back to downtowns," says Paul S. Grogan, a former Harvard University administrator who co-wrote the 2000 book Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival.

"The renewed cities are ones that have either arrested their population decline or have been successful in attracting immigrants."

One path out of decline for Woonsocket may be Hispanic immigrants, whose grocery stores and small companies have rejuvenated inner-city business districts in Providence and Central Falls.

Another route is Woonsocket's reinvention as a bedroom community. The city is roughly equidistant from New England's three largest cities — Providence, Boston, and Worcester — and abuts the fast-growing economic region stretching from south-central Massachusetts to Boston.

Already, some professional couples are trickling into Woonsocket, looking for large old houses that they could never afford in Boston or even Providence.

Six years ago, Josh and Julie Fenton were starting a family and decided they wanted a house that was "big and old and Victorian." They looked on Providence's East Side, where Josh had grown up, but the prices there were too steep. Finally, after hunting and finding nothing in Rhode Island's northern suburbs, they saw a vintage 17-room house in Woonsocket's North End. The price: $325,000.

"It was a spectacular house," says Josh Fenton. "You couldn't touch it on the East Side for less than a million."

Fenton says he loves his new neighborhood; the Fenton children, aged 6 and 4, now have playmates down the street. "We tell people it's like living in the 1950s."

While Josh Fenton commutes to his advertising job in Providence, Julie Fenton commutes to her public-relations job in Boston.

"Woonsocket today," says Josh, "is a lot more of a suburb of Boston than most people realize."

— With reports from staff writers David Herzog and Michael Smith